Tuesday, November 5, 2013

For Orthodox Women, Getting the Get Can Take Years

Daily Beast Last month, an FBI sting operation netted a rabbi, the head of a New
York yeshiva and eight other men, two of whom were volunteers at an
organization for at-risk Jewish youth. Rabbi Mendel Epstein made his
living campaigning at the rabbinical courts on behalf of women whose
husbands refused to grant them religious divorces; this past summer, he
wrote and released a “Bill of Rights of a Jewish Wife.” But he and his
coterie seem to have taken his advocacy too far—specifically, they’ve
been accused of exacting up to $60,000 from despairing wives in exchange
for kidnapping and torturing their husbands, with the aim of coercing
the men into signing the Jewish divorce document. All 10 defendants were
initially denied bail after appearing in Federal District Court in
Trenton, New Jersey (bail was later set
for all men involved, and all 10 defendents pleaded not guilty).
They’ve been called unlikely criminals. They have also, albeit less
frequently, been called unlikely feminists.[...]

A woman whose husband won’t give up the get is referred to as an agunah,
from the Hebrew for “chained,” and the condition is more common than
you might imagine. A survey spearheaded by Barbara Zakheim, co-founder
of the Jewish Coalition Against Domestic Abuse (JCADA), found that
between 2005 to 2010, there were over 460 cases of “shackled” Jewish
women in North America, a number that underrepresents the problem; the
research team didn’t reach out to agunot directly, but to
domestic abuse and family service organizations—and by and large,
agencies serving more right-wing communities declined to participate.
Zakheim also found that a sizeable number of agunot were living
in poverty and not receiving any sort of spousal support. “There were
changes made to halacha [Jewish law] during ancient times and in that
respect, those ages were more progressive than the one we’re living in
now,” she said. “The Orthodox rabbinate need to get their act together
to come up with a halachic solution. They have a lot to answer for.”

In Israel, noncompliant husbands are sometimes sent to jail until they agree to sign the get. But America’s secular court system cannot intervene in a religious divorce, leaving the agunah
without many options. A rabbinical court might, if the man won’t
respond to a summons, issue an order of contempt, which essentially
states that the woman’s husband has refused to grant her a get and
calls on the Jewish community to take a stand. She might also approach
an advocacy group like the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot
(ORA), a New York-based non-profit that, since its founding in 2002, has
resolved 205 agunah cases worldwide. ORA works, free of
charge, to open the lines of communication between the two parties.
Failing that, it exerts legal and halachically sanctioned forms of
pressure on the get withholder. “We see the refusal to issue a get
as a form of domestic abuse,” said Rabbi Jeremy Stern, the
organization’s executive director. “It’s not just about black and blue
marks. It’s about one person asserting their dominance over another.” [....]

August 8, 2017 10:30 pm yeshiva world Since the implementation of the Rav Kav transportation smart card in Israel, the Knesset’s Ombud...

Rav Zev Leff recommends my 3 books on Child & Domestic Abuse

Click on picture to hear excerpt from Jan. 2012 Kav L'Noar conference. "I want to first give hakoras hatov to Dr. Baruch Shulem who provided me with Daniel Eidensohn's books on child abuse and domestic abuse which offered me many many sources and it gave me many many ideas to be able to deal with the subject properly. And I thank them and I recommend those books to everyone who is interested in getting a good foundation what the issues are in this very important topic."